The next phase of the Go experience
June 9, 2020 by The VS Code Team, @code
From the beginning, we have worked with developer communities to build Visual Studio Code as a powerful, extensible editor. Five years into this journey, individuals and organizations in our community have helped us create an editor that is really for all developers, using any language.
For many of our 11 million users, VS Code is their primary code editor, as is the case for 41% of developers that are working with Go (according to the Go developer survey). We are proud of the work that we have done on the Go extension for Visual Studio Code, which is the result of an extensive development effort together with the Go community by virtue of both code contributions and integration with over a dozen independently maintained tools.
Last year, we worked with the Go team to enable support for a new language server for the Go language, gopls, and improving support for the Delve debugger. Using the new language server improves the experience of Go developers working with VS Code. It offers an integrated solution for various components of the core developer experience (code completion, jump to definition, hover tooltips, etc.) through a tool that is maintained by the Go project itself and is kept up to date with support for new language features such as Go modules.
The Go extension for VS Code joins the Go project
Today we are happy to announce that the Go team has officially stepped up as the new maintainer of the Go extension. During the last few years working together with the Go team, it's been clear they are in the best position to advance the tooling ecosystem for Go and ensure that it evolves alongside the language.
Both the Go and Visual Studio Code teams recognize the importance of Visual Studio Code to the Go community and believe strongly in an open tooling ecosystem for Go developers. Even as the extension graduates to be part of the Go project, the VS Code team will continue to work together with the rest of the Go project and the community to deliver a great experience for all Gophers.
Being part of the Go project will also ensure that the community is engaged on every step along the way. The extension currently depends on many different tools that are maintained by the community, and we want to work with the owners of those projects to help reduce the burden of maintenance work on the Go community.
In practical terms, as the extension graduates to being part of the Go project, we will be changing the publisher of the extension from "Microsoft" to "Go Team at Google" in the VS Code Marketplace.
Additionally, the source code repository for the extension is changing to join the rest of the Go project at golang/vscode-go.
Amongst our community of contributors, we'd like to extend special thanks to Ramya Rao (@ramyanexus), the lead maintainer of the extension and contributor to the community for many years, as well as Luke Hoban (@lukehoban) and Erich Gamma (@erichgamma) for their contributions since September 2015! We would also like to thank Rebecca Stambler (@stamblerre) and the Go team for their collaboration.
Contributing and support
In order to offer the best experience to Go developers, we ask you to continue sharing your feedback with us by opening issues on GitHub. We also welcome every contribution from the community.
If you need assistance with the Go extension for VS Code, you can connect with our team members on the #vscode channel on the Gophers Slack. Conversations between Go team members working on the extension will take place in the #vscode-dev channel in the same Slack workspace, and we welcome discussion on issues and contributions from all community members.
From all of us in the Visual Studio Code and Go teams, we are excited for the future ahead and for the ability to work together to deliver world-class tooling to every developer working with Go, and we look forward continue collaborating with the community.
Happy Coding!
The VS Code Team
P.S. You can also read the announcement from the Go team on The Go Blog.